


Entrainment

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, POV Nile Freeman, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:36:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25495480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: Nile in transit and transition.
Comments: 128
Kudos: 615





	Entrainment

They go to ground at a ramshackle farmhouse on the ass end of England, a big place with tiny rooms and a wood-fired stove that Nile doesn't even pretend to know how to use. Nicky and Joe take over the running of the place and it's not until the third day that Nile realizes that that's not because Andy's wounded and spending most of her time knocked out on painkillers. 

"Domesticity is learned, not born," Nicky says as he blows into the box in the stove with the burning wood, making the pile glow brighter. He puts a kettle of water on the burner on top. "When it's not compelled, it's a gift." 

Which is something to file away for another time, like most of what Nile hears these days. She's a thousand years younger than her roommates and she thinks that should register more than it does. 

"You're in shock," Andy tells her when she tries to say as much. "Your brain's still catching up to what happened to you. It'll be a while before the rest of us really matter." 

Nile's not catching up. She still wakes up early like she's got formation or at least somewhere to be. She works out like she's still got her PFT and the crap from the guys in her unit to worry about. She still makes her bed and polices her space like some bitch-ass sergeant major's going to walk into her room for an inspection. She's still a Marine, even if she's not. (There's no such thing as an ex-Marine.) She still takes pictures on her phone of the gardens and the stove and everything else that's nothing she's ever seen before she remembers that there's nobody she can show those pictures to because they all think she's been kidnapped. That's the story CENTCOM is going with, that she's some new Jessica Lynch being held by the bad guys. (Better that than Bowe Bergdahl, fucking deserter.) She's not catching up at all. 

Andy hands her a package one afternoon, brown paper tied up in string like out of a Dickens novel. The boys are gone, out on bicycles for shopping, and Nile doesn't think the timing's coincidental. Certainly not when she sees what's inside. 

"It's from Booker," Andy tells her as she looks over the contents. There are three passports, one American and two Canadian, with her picture in all of them. There's a new phone with a charger and a USB cable taped to it. There's a cloth purse full of really old coins and bits of jewelry. And there's an envelope with her name on it and paper inside. "Immortal starter pack for the Twenty-First Century." 

Nile looks up. 

"He knows where we are, at least for now," Andy says with a shrug, taking a swig out of the bottle of fancy single malt that she drinks from like it's a canteen despite the stuff really hitting her now. "The punishment is that he can't do anything with the information." 

But he has done something and Nile is willing to bet the money in the purse that it was at Andy's orders. 

The letter is handwritten and in the kind of flowing script that Nile knows must be a fountain pen even if she's never seen anyone write with one. It explains the passports (no point in trying to pass for something she can't be, they'll get exotic once she's picked up some languages), the purse contents (all have significant value in trade and will be the start of her own cache; they will be her own independence from the group if she needs it), and the phone (her mother will start closing out her accounts once her death is official, better transfer her data and photos now). But the rest, Nile realizes, is not Booker performing one last service for the group. It's to her and it makes her weep because it's all the things he would have told her in person if he could have. About how she should recognize that she's effectively planning her own suicide and that grief is the reasonable response to that. About how she should let Joe and Nicky take care of her even when it's the last thing she wants. About how she should always listen because nothing Andy says is without purpose. And she should use him, Booker, as the object lesson because these are all things he did not learn when he was in her position. He concludes it by wishing her well and hoping that she will perhaps be able to guide the others away from their hatred of him. "In a hundred years," it finishes. 

"He's a good man," Andy says before Nile's really ready to stop pretending that she's alone. "He's just… This thing, whatever it is that makes us _us_ \- until it doesn't - it doesn't check to make sure we're up to it first." 

By the time Joe and Nicky return, bike baskets full of flowers and bread and fruit and a hunk of beef that could feed ten, Nile has stashed everything in her room, washed her face, and is making lemonade from scratch because these ancient heathens don't consider it worthwhile. 

"We'll leave on Monday," Andy tells them over dinner. "Chunnel to Paris, then we'll figure out a quiet way to get to Greece." 

Joe looks at Andy and then at Nile and then back at Andy again. "He came through?" 

"Of course," Andy tells him and Nile can hear the unspoken conversation, at least part of it. The part that was the reason Andy waited to hand over the package. 

* * *

Paris is amazing, what little Nile gets to see of it. They're not staying in one of the fancy areas near the landmarks she's heard of. They're in a more lived-in neighborhood and it's amazing because it doesn't feel that foreign at all. It feels like Chicago, almost, the same high-low mix of people and places and cultures and she feels less off-kilter here than she's been since Helmand. Since before Helmand, maybe, because all of the Corps routine and culture didn't make it impossible to forget that she'd been in a war zone. 

A conversation about changing up her look a little goes sideways because none of her teammates knows shit about black hair. It's not offensive or ignorant or anything other than really funny, which turns out to be really needed because the conversation started in the first place because the DoD is about to declare Corporal Nile Freeman KIA. Her official USMC portrait's going to be all over the web for a couple of days and she needs to not look like that picture. And this death, the one that will stick when none of the others will, guts her like a fucking trout and so yeah, she's going to laugh at Andy, Nicky, and Joe not knowing she's got braiding hair that needs to be taken out and no, they are not doing it with scissors. 

Which is how she ends up in a _banlieu_ populated by ebony-skinned Africans speaking a French she can't understand a lick of, walking into a salon with Joe because he can translate. He gets shooed away quickly enough by a hijab-clad woman holding a magazine with pictures for Nile to choose from. Joe has enough time to hand Nile a fist full of euros before fleeing for his life, laughing his way out the door and promising to be back for Nile in an hour. 

"Two!" she calls after him. 

Nile goes through the pictures and winds up picking out a short natural style that looks like something Lupita might wear. She's not sure if it will fit her face and head - she's had braids since she enlisted because the DoD's been pissy about natural hair and locs until five minutes ago and the USMC is always ten minutes behind them. But with that 'do she will absolutely not look like the Marine who's about to be sent home via Dover in a pine box with a flag. 

The gal in the hijab points to a different picture, one with pipe cleaner curls that look adorable but also high maintenance. It takes Nile a second to remember that she doesn't have to worry about helmet hair anymore. 

"Too much work," she says, miming with gestures. The girl shakes her head in disagreement, but they go back and forth pointing at different pictures until they settle on a different natural style that won't need tools to keep up. 

Getting her hair done is a luxury and a comfort she didn't realize she needed. She can't understand the patois everyone's speaking but it's soothing and familiar. Same with the smells of oils and creams and the deft fingers on her scalp and she doesn't fall asleep but she relaxes in a way she hasn't been able to since Before. 

She hears Joe come back but doesn't turn to look for more reasons than that there are scissors by her ears. 

When everything is done, she's led to the back, an office that's not a public part of the salon, by an older woman who presents her to a younger one and starts speaking rapidly. 

"My auntie wants to know if you are safe with that man," the younger one says in BBC English. "He is very well-traveled and you are not and he is making all the decisions." 

Nile needs a moment to realize that she's being asked if she's being sex trafficked. But once she realizes, she can't help laughing and it comes out as an ugly snort that makes her cover her face in embarrassment. 

"No, no, he's not… " she manages to get out. "It's not like that at all. He's not… He's kind of like my uncle." 

The younger woman doesn't seem placated and the auntie even less so. 

"He's been with someone for a thousand years," Nile goes on and the fact that it's true but it sounds like hyperbole makes her giggle involuntarily. "They're my very weird family, but he really is just being protective. He'd trust me with his life and I trust him with mine." 

The last she says with as much earnestness as she can muster and it's a lot because it's true.

They give her back her braiding hair, wrapped up in scented paper and tucked into a bag. 

When Joe sees her, he stands and his eyes light up with delight and Nile can't help but smile back. 

"You look beautiful," he tells her, taking her hands in his. "I hope you are happy with it." 

"I hope I am, too," she says because she's not used to this kind of knock-you-over affection from anyone but her mom, let alone someone she's only known for a couple of weeks. Joe and Nicky aren't Andy, holding the world at battleax-length. They can be, but the immediacy with which they have pulled her close is occasionally breathtaking. 

* * *

They fly in the hold of a cargo plane to Ioannina, spending a few days there so that Andy can recover because she's not used to how slowly her wounds heal now and neither is anyone else and it's been like this since London. Now, finally, Joe and Nicky are starting to use Nile as a barometer for how much they should call Andy on her bullshit about being fine because Nile is the only one to remember that gunshot wounds to the torso are stay-in-the-hospital kind of events. But Andy hates the limitations and she hates being cared for and she can be a mean drunk when she wants to be. Once she gets too unbearable, they stuff her in a car and drive to a place on the coast called Igoumenitsa and from there took a ferry to an island called Paxi. 

All the while Joe and Nicky are arguing about why they are not going somewhere else in Greece instead. They have a place on Symi, Joe tells Nile, they've had it for a couple hundred years, and it's beautiful and big enough for the four of them and it would be perfect. 

"Do you want to constantly get stopped for your papers because you look like a migrant?" Nicky asks, exasperated. Nile is pretty sure Nicky's been asking this question in other languages since they left France because this is only the English version of the argument, not the first version of it. "Because that's what is happening over there now."

Joe frowns at Nicky and then at Nile. "And we can't go back to Kefalonia because someone was feeling nostalgic in the 1990s." 

"Forty-five years should have been enough time," Nicky sighs and Nile bites her lip to keep from laughing because this is Nicky giving up the argument to spare Joe the defeat. "Who remembers a dirty face in the darkness after forty-five years?" 

And so Nile hears about the time Nicky died in an earthquake in 1953 along with hundreds of others in Kefalonia, about how he dug himself out and then spent the next hours and days and weeks digging through the rubble for survivors and then for corpses. And how he went back with Joe in 1998 for a vacation that went haywire on the second day. 

"This old lady asks me if my father is Nicolas and if he lived in Davgata in '53 and I wind up meeting her children and her grandchildren - and then the children and grandchildren of everyone else who got pulled out of the rubble on that part of the island," Nicky tells her, embarrassed and exasperated twenty years later. "It was horrible. We couldn't go swimming or anything, just all day long drinking coffee and eating sweets in people's homes." 

Nile just gawps at him for a long second before bursting out laughing. 

"Oh my god," she finally wheezes out. "You really didn't get it. You spent a week literally being introduced to people who owe their very existence to you being immortal and you never saw it." 

Nicky and Joe look at each other and then at her. 

"You are both so stupid for being so damned wise," she tells them, shaking her head. Joe shrugs, accepting the fact. 

Their place is a villa in the mountainous middle of the island, right outside a tiny village that is bisected by the single-lane road that passes for Main Street on Paxi. It's immaculate when they get there, with fruit and wine and sweets and cheese in the kitchen and the windows open and the beds made. Nile and Andy both argue for Joe and Nicky to take the bedroom way the hell away from the others because neither of them want to overhear any more than they have to. Nile's room looks out over trees and more trees and she can barely make out the mountain that's not too far away because it's afternoon and Greece is smoggy even out here. She can hear sheep in the distance and crickets closer by and she's pretty sure it's going to be hard to sleep with this much nature all around. 

Right on cue, a donkey brays. 

If she thought life at the English farmhouse was lazy, she wasn't prepared for Greece at all. 

"We're on Mediterranean time now," Joe explains once more after Nile tries to do something and is told it has to wait. This time it's going to the store, which will be closed because it's 1530 local and everyone's taking a nap. "You are on immortal time in the Mediterranean, which is even slower. Relax. Turn off your alarm. There is nothing that needs to be done right now." 

Mediterranean time is ridiculous, like a permanent vacation. Siesta is a real thing here, as is dinner at 2200 and no such thing as fixed schedules for anything. The government apparently works when it feels like - or when it isn't on strike. They lose cell service for a week and have to drive to Lakka, the nearest 'big' town, to use the internet. Which really only bothers Nile but Nicky goes with her to translate because while there are enough tourists in Lakka that English gets you somewhere, when the language barrier goes up it goes all the way up. Everyone who can speak English uses it first with her because as far as she knows there're no black Greeks and so she must be a tourist, but when they don't she knows it's going to be a struggle. She's trying to learn the basics and can say please and thank you and excuse me and yes and no, but she can't really read the letters of the alphabet yet, let alone sound out the words to see if they seem like something she might understand. Which she found out the hard way when she put shampoo in the shopping basket instead of dish liquid. 

Nicky gets spoken to in Greek first always and she asks him if it's a White Boy thing or does he really look like he might be Greek. 

"It's more that everyone here is part Italian," he tells her as they sip frappe at an outdoor café. "Perils of proximity." 

Frappe is what everyone drinks and she's a little scandalized to realize that it comes out of a Nescafe can even in restaurants. But "ena frappe glyko me gala, parakalo" is probably the first full sentence she can say even if it makes Nicky wince for reasons that don't include her accent. She lives with coffee snobs and putting milk and sugar in makes them twitch. 

Andy heals up and starts to train and Nile's the only one who will spar with her because Nicky and Joe aren't used to pulling their punches (or blades) and hurting her terrifies them now. It pisses Andy off and she takes it out on Nile, but that's training in its own way because while Nile saw some old time weapons in Afghanistan and it was a knife that killed her, the default personal weapon there is still an AK. She's not sure how much she needs to be prepared to take on someone with a battleaxe, but Andy tells her that that's not the point. 

"You need to stop flinching," Andy barks as they wait for Nile's arm to mend itself back together. "You need to accept that the wound is going to happen and keep going." 

"I took a bullet for you," Nile reminds her through grit teeth because it hurts like a motherfucker. 

"But you're ducking flesh wounds here," is the retort. "It's not instinct for you yet. It won't be for a while." 

She trains with Nicky and Joe, too, separately and together. They want to show her how to fight differently than she does - more, not better - as well as how they fight as a team. This she understands, the cohesiveness of the unit, and it can be fun but it can also be frustrating because Joe and Nicky don't always realize when they are Joe-and-Nicky and while Andy can totally roll with it, Nile can't yet. She's getting better at it, though. 

Nicky letting her hold his sword is a big moment - a moment she ruins by giggling at the innuendo of the offer and then Joe's mock-heartbreak at the betrayal. But then Nicky shows her how to stand and how to hold the blade and how to take basic swings without leaving herself too exposed, Joe dutifully poking her in the ribs with his own sword, and it's a lot more than just a combat lesson. Nile owns (owned) a sword herself, the ceremonial NCO sword she got once she made E-4, but this doesn't feel like that. It feels more like when she was a kid and her father would let her hold his sword in its scabbard as he got done up in his dress blues. It's meaningful because it's not just history, it's someone's personal history and it's a person she cares about. Nicky and Joe aren't quite ride-or-die family yet, not when she's still smarting from her FET girls giving her up like that when they'd been tighter than tight, but it's there and she can see the outlines of it. She'd not-die for them any day. 

**Author's Note:**

> [a notice for this fic has been posted to Tumblr if you'd like to like or reblog there](https://laporcupina.tumblr.com/post/624562638178893824/entrainment-domenika-marzione-the-old-guard)


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